Due to recent advances in technology, computer users are now able to enjoy many features that provide an improved user experience, such as playing various media and multimedia content on personal, laptop, and handheld computers, as well as cellular phones and other portable media devices. For example, most computing devices today are able to play media items of various types for users to enjoy. These computing devices can readily access thousands of media items, making organizing such media items a formidable task. In addition, many such devices can capably access vendor-supplied media libraries containing many more media items. For example, a single user subscribing to a media service (e.g., a subscription service) may readily access over a million available media items. Such a subscription service may provide too many media item choices for some users to review and rate for personal use.
Conventionally, users can “star rate” their content, such as media content. In one such conventional example, users can assign a media item a rating of between one and five stars, or an unrated rating. This gives a user six rating options with respect to each media item. These ratings may then be used by the user to control playback of media items on his device. For example, a user may wish to play only those media items that are highly rated to experience only those media items considered favorites. If the media item is not specifically rated by the user, a rating of “unrated” is assigned to the media item. Rating options offer new dimensions of media selection to users. A relatively simple example of rating usage is creation of an auto-playlist called “My favorite songs” containing a query for media items rated with either four stars or five stars. Such queries enable what may be termed “pivoted views” on a set of media items. A user need no longer explore his media items by file name, but rather a user can pivot on the set of media items using metadata tags, such as star rating.
Conventional media players, such as Windows Media Player Version 10 by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., are star-rating enabled, allowing for such automatic pivots based upon metadata tags. Such features are a useful tool for those users who put forth the effort required to rate their content. Unfortunately, many users do not invest the effort required to rank many of the media items to which they have access. Thus, a system or method capable of providing user ratings either automatically or more easily would have high value. One such co-owned patent disclosure related to this topic is patent application Ser. No. 10/622,971, entitled Effective Ratings for Media Content, filed Jul. 18, 2003. In one example, the rating of a media item was set to be the user's rating if it existed, or else an automatic rating computed by other data, such as media item playcount data. In other conventional systems, a “Service Rating Source” acting as an external service provider provides media item ratings to users. With such services, if a user trusts the ratings offered by the service, the perceived need to manually rate media items is reduced. A user relying upon a rating service may never invest the effort to manually rate media items themselves, yet reap all the benefits of pivots based upon media item ratings. Consider another example where a user has 300 old compact discs (CDs). The user can rip this collection of CDs into their computing device and, through the use of service ratings, all the less desirable media items are automatically rated as one star, while all the more desirable media items are rated as four or five stars. With no effort by the user, this library of several thousand media items may be quickly rated for use by the user.
Although the systems described above are beneficial to users, they may suffer from the following drawbacks, among others. First, a user may not agree with some of the ratings provided by the rating service provider, such that the provided ratings to not match the taste of the user. Second, the user may have little means to communicate his preferences to the service provider to alter present or future ratings provided by the service provider. Third, the ratings may remain largely unchanged over time, which may lead to a stale, stagnant listening experience.
Unfortunately, these issues are not adequately addressed by any conventional system. Conventional techniques provide only one rating for a particular media item. Such conventional techniques provide no ratings tailored to particular users. There is a need, therefore, for a system or method capable of providing ratings for users based upon information about the users that may be used to place the user in a particular community of users. In other words, the system or method may provide user ratings to the user that more closely align with what the user may have rated had he rated the media items himself. Providing community-based ratings based upon information relating to users and placing each user within a user community is desirable.